All posts by Navin Kabra

InEnCy – The Energy Efficiency Business Plan Contest

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IndiaCo Advisors, a Pune-based investment management firm has announced InEnCy, a business plan competition focusing on energy efficiency.

Here is the pitch:

Energy efficiency, a prime factor in India’s economic growth and sustenance, requires innovative ideas converging into practice. For the purpose of promoting Energy Efficiency ideas into viable business, IndiaCo Advisors Pvt. Ltd. is proud to present InEnCy: The Business Plan Competition.

InEnCy is a first of its kind business plan competition in India, launched by IndiaCo in January 2011. It aims at identifying potential relevant innovations that could lead to viable businesses with technological and or scientific breakthroughs to improve or revolutionize Energy Efficiency. With this focus InEnCy has been able to create a support network of industry experts, VCs & investors operating in Energy Efficiency space. The InEnCy team has made a confidant foray into the competitive field of mentoring and Guidance and plans on making InEnCy Business plan competition an annual event to be held in May each year.

Laser focused on the energy efficiency sector, this competition would give a platform to budding entrepreneurs to present their innovative business plans. Mentored by a panel of industry experts, these entrepreneurs will have the further opportunity to shape and fine tune their concepts and hence turn them into successful and thriving businesses.

One winner will be proclaimed, but many more ideas to change the world will get exposure through the competition process. At the Grand Finale on May 14th InEnCy will be showcasing the final 10 business plans/ideas; best three of which will receive exciting awards!

Fast facts:

  • Shortlisted candidates will be assigned mentors from a panel of experts.
  • Online mentoring is available if required
  • Structured and transparent mentoring process.
  • Prizes worth Rs. 5,00,000.
  • A chance to pitch for Investments from IndiaCo Energy Efficiency Fund.
  • Network access to investors, mentors and potential partners.
  • Access to technology incubators.

The last date for registering is 27th Feb, 2011. Check out the InEnCy website and get started.

Pune’s Webonise launches ‘AppBazar’ – Android Marketplace and Apps Contest for India

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Webonise Lab, a Pune-based startup, is creating waves in the mobile apps space. Their mobile development arm Mobinise is set to launch an India specific mobile app store for Android phone users. This Android app store called “AppBazar” will have a strong ‘Indian’ flavour – right from Bollywood Masala apps to cricket and even religious apps. And to get the process of “Indian” Android Apps kickstarted, they’ve announced an Indian Android Developer Contest – where prizes worth Rs. 1.5 lakhs are up for grabs in 10 different categories.

Mobinise sees great opportunity in developing India specific content and intends to give the users a unique mobile experience and in different vernaculars too! AppBazar is expected to hit the market by the first week of April and they plan to target tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

The company’s logic behind the India centric focus – it believes that though Indians have a penchant for anything Western, they love to tinge it with – and in fact refuse to give up – their own Desi tastes and flavours. The Tandoori Pizza and Aloo Tikki Burger are just a few examples of products that have been fine-tuned for the Indian market. Hence the rationale to ‘Indianize’ a product that has become an integral part of our daily lives – our mobile devices.

To to jumpstart the process of creating Indianized apps for AppBazar, Mobinise has started the Indian Android Developer Contest(IADC) and is inviting developers to build apps around android for the Indian user. The developer contest is targeted at students, platform enthusiasts, freelancers, and the Android application development community.

We asked Shardul Mohite, CEO of Webonise, about the response to the contest so far and he said:

“The response we’ve got is very positive. We even went to Hyderabad to meet Google and get permission to run the contest. They were supportive and excited as well. The most unexpected response we got was when CNBC TechGuru showed interest in promoting the contest actively, and they’re coming to meet us next week.”

The registration for the contest is already open, and individuals or teams interested can start registering now. From 26th Feb, contestants can start uploading their apps, and the contest will remain open until March 26, 2010. Apps shortlisted for the second round (voting) will be announced on 1st April, and the final prize winners will be announced on 22th April. Prizes are: Rs. 25000 for the grand prize winner, Rs. 15000 for the best Indian app, Rs. 10000 for the best designed app, and a Rs. 10000 prize for the best app in each of 10 categories. The different categories include entertainment (or Masala Apps), Games, Travel, Lifestyle and Health related applications. Apart from this there are also some interesting non-cash rewards.

The only eligibility criteria that they set is for the application to be Indian in nature claiming that the ‘Indian-ness’ of the app is what matters most.

There would be two rounds of judging and parameters like design, usability, innovative idea, popularity (for instance likes on Facebook, votes on the contest site) and of course the votes of jury members will together decide the winners of the contest.

Check out the rules, the full list of categories, and the about page of the contest for more information.

Event Report – CloudCamp Pune

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This report of the CloudCamp that was held in Pune last weekend, is a guest post by Chirag Jog, CTO of Clogeny Technologies

CloudCamp is an un-conference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. CloudCamp, encourages end users, IT professionals and vendors to participate and share their thoughts in several open discussions. Cloudcamp is organized in cities across the world .

CloudCamp Pune was held on 5th Feb 2011, hosted at Persistent Systems. The chief organizers were Shreekanth Joshi, Persistent Systems and Larry Carvalho, RobustCloud. The event was sponsored by Clogeny (only local/Pune-based sponsor), Netmagic, Trillion IT solutions, Microsoft Azure, Hexagrid and Tropo. NASSCOM was the in-kind sponsor.

The camp drew around 400+ registrations and around 150+ folks showed up for the conference making it the 3rd largest camp after Brazil and London. Larry Carvalho, was the coordinator on-stage.

Lightening Talks

As it typical of any event held in Pune, the crowd trickled till around 1045am and the event kicked off officially at 11am. Larry spoke first about Cloudcamp in general followed by which we had a bunch of lightning talks by all the sponsors. Persistent first spoke about the potential challenges customers will face while they try to migrate to the cloud. Trillion Tech followed talking more about the work Trillion Tech does than Cloud Computing. Interestingly they have deployed their private cloud offering in the US Federal Department of Treasury. Microsoft gave their regular Azure pitch where now folks can deploy non-.NET apps as well (like PHP/Python or Java based apps). Microsoft made quote: “SQL Azure is the only Relational DB in the cloud” – which is highly debatable. Clogeny, then gave their lightning talk about products they are working on namely building hybrid clouds and automated deployment platforms. Finally, Netmagic spoke about their Cloud offering. They aim to solve the compute problems of all India. Companies like Tata, Manipal Univ and India Infoline are some of the big customers the recently funded Netmagic have on their roster.

Suhas Kelkar, BMC representing NASSCOM gave a nice lightning talk about the UID project. One of the aims of the UID project is to provide “Identity as a Service”. Anyone around the world should be able to identify an Indian based on biometrics in less-than-2-seconds using a massive data de-duplication engine.

Larry gave 20:20 talk i.e. 20 slides in 20 secs per slide about general Cloud Computing concepts. Any Cloud solutions provided should be “OSSM” (pronounced awesome) – On demand, Self-Serviced and Measured. He explained basic Cloud Computing terms like PaaS, IaaS and SaaS

Cloud Computing Unpanel

Larry mentioned that he had heard complaints in the past that Indian Cloudcamps are less interactive and audience participation is really low. He tackled this problem very well with an un-panel discussion. Here is how it happened. He asked folks who were cloud experts to raise their hands. Around 15 or so raised their hands. He got all of them to come down to the main stage. After that, he started asking audience to “ask questions to these cloud experts.” He took down around
15-20 questions on white sheets of papers from the audience.

The “cloud experts” then answered all these questions. Some of the questions asked were about security concerns in the cloud, vendor lock-in, developer’s role, how to choose the right solution and so on. This was a fun session nicely organized by Larry ensuring audience participation.

Some of the questions asked and their answers:

  1. Security in the cloud: Security in the cloud is no different than securing your data centre. Ensure your network and host level firewalls are locked down and all communication is secure.
  2. Vendor lock-in: Everyone talks about the marriage but no one talks about the divorce i.e. moving away from a vendor. Design your applications properly so that migration from one vendor to another vendor is easy. One of the “cloud experts” mentioned how by designing a proper hibernate layer, they were able to move their Java application from Google App Engine to Amazon’s EC2 in a day. Design is the key.
  3. Application development for/in the cloud: Experts spoke about how quickly they could develop massively scalable applications using force.com’s platform-as-a-service.
  4. Making the right choices: Experts spoke about evaluating different offerings in terms of features and cost. Do a small POC before doing committing to a any vendor.
  5. Storage/Databases in the cloud: There are all sorts of databases (relational and non-relational i.e NoSQL ) available in the cloud which provide redundancy and consistency. e.g. Amazon’s S3, RDS, SQL Azure, MongoDB and so on.
  6. Will Network/System administrators lose their jobs? This was the question of the day raised by a lot. The answer is that your datacenter will become virtual but it will still exist and need regular maintenance. Platform-as-a-service solutions don’t provide a silver bullet that you can junk all your hardware capacity for that. You will need IaaS like Amazon EC2, Netmagic and that needs maintenance regularly.

Breakout Sessions

Post lunch, there were quite a few breakout sessions based on the audience questions asked before lunch. Larry himself conducted a session on Security in the Cloud. Janakiram MSV from Amazon, conducted a session on Migrating Applications to the Cloud. I attended Janakiram’s session. He spoke about his experiences in evaluating and then migration applications to the Cloud.

Some takeaways from Janakiram’s session:

  • Capex can go down significantly, but Opex needs to be tempered by revenue.
  • Steps to migrate into the cloud:
    • Do a cloud vendor assessment: Choose which vendor suits your current and future needs.
    • Do a simple Proof of Concept.
    • Migrate the data: Choose which part of the data (images, binary blobs etc) can use NoSQL databases and which parts are relational and need a Relational Database application.
    • Migrate the application: Either “forklift” the entire application and run it as-in the cloud or use a hybrid approach.
    • In the hybrid approach, some of your application’s context remains local while some is in the cloud and they communicate via shared queues or similar such ways.

  • Use Cloud vendor’s value added services besides compute and storage: eg. Leverage EC2’s queuing solution i.e Simple Queue Service instead of implementing your own.

  • Tweak as per the need: After running the application for a while in the cloud, keep tweaking your application for optimal use for resources.

I attended Netmagic’s demo. Netmagic gave a demo of their current cloud offering which is currently in beta. Similar to other popular cloud vendors, Netmagic lets you create Windows/Linux servers on the fly, connect them to remote storage, provides network level firewalls and provides proprietary software load-balancers. The UI was clean and easy to understand. Their SLA guarantees an uptime of 99.993%. Currrently, their solution looks very robust especially in the Indian market and there will offer a complete offering soon with APIs and connectors.

We (Kalpak Shah and myself) personally held a breakout session for developers and their role in the cloud. The main questions asked by developers were around “What and how do I develop in the cloud?”

The answers:

Application development fundamentally remains the same for the developer. You write code in Java, Python, .NET or any of your favorite languages. What changes is the environment in which is deployed and its use cases. e.g. If you want to host your Java Web application, instead of buying space from a hosting solution provider, deploy it directly into Google AppEngine (GAE). GAE will host it for you and scale up/down as per load. e.g. If you want to use scalable storage, your application will need to use a NoSQL storage solution like Amazon’s S3. The developer’s role here is to understand how to use S3’s APIs. Hence the developer would need to design and develop his application leveraging these “cloud” technologies.

Furthermore, the developer also would need to think “cloud” and design with multi-tenancy (a software application is designed to logically partition its data and configuration, and each client sees a custom version of that application) in mind for his Software-as-a-service offering. eg. Gmail or Facebook.

Conclusion

Larry closed the session by thanking the sponsors and participants. There was feedback about what all can be improved in the future. Key suggestions were: having talks about cloud basics in the beginning, having good net connectivity (for demos), and a post conference beer party (to ensure folks stick till the end).

All in all, CloudCamp is definitely a great un-conference if you want to learn about cloud, if you are an expert and what to share your experiences and knowledge, and if you have products to showcase.

The next CloudCamp in India is in Delhi (12th Feb) and Chennai (19th Feb).

About the Author – Chirag Jog

Chirag Jog is the CTO at Clogeny Technologies where they work on innovative ideas across the cloud computing stack. He, along with the CEO drives the overall strategy of the company. He is passionate about everything “cloud” and around it. He is an ex-PICTian.

Pune Design Festival – 6 days of design events in Pune 10-15 Feb

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From 10th to 15th Feb, Pune will play host to a host of design events across the city, organized as a part of the Pune Design Festival. To quote the website:

Design has become the epicentre of many business success stories in India. The value of design stretches across all industries and sectors – from manufacturing to services. Recognizing this integral role of Design for the competitiveness of your businesses and betterment of our society we organize such events annually. This year’s edition brings you rich and diversified events to help us learn from each other and contribute to the betterment of the Industry.

We are pleased to bring to you the 5th Pune Design Festival from 10-15th February 2011 at various locations across the city, being organised along with MCCIA.

There are a large number of events being held – see the website for the full list. Some of them are free events, some have nominal charges and some have substantial fees. Note: a number of these festivals are geared towards automobile design and industrial design, so don’t go there expecting software/graphic design…

The free and nominal fee events have been listed in the PuneTech Calendar. For the others you’ll need to check the details on the Pune Design Festival website

Event Report: “Amplify Mobility” event on Mobile Tech at Bharati Vidyapeeth

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This Saturday, there was a day-long event on mobile technology organized by Amplify Mindware, a group of educational institutions housed at Bharati Vidyapeeth. This is a live-blog of three of the talks at the event; (which is unfortunately being posted with a 2-day delay because my internet connection did not work at the venue.) There were other talks which haven’t been captured either because I missed the talk (as I had to leave early), or it wasn’t interesting enough, or they were student presentations that were appropriate for the audience but not for this blog (and my own presentation on “Mobile Technology Trends” that I couldn’t blog).

Anyway, here are my notes on 3 of the talks:

Enhance Education’s talk about MyOpenCampus portal and the e-Pad tablet

Lots of people have lots of ideas on how to improve education. And most of them will not work because that’s not what the students want. Amit Sharma of Enhance Education claims that the right approach is to ask the students what they want. And his research indicates that students just want answers to their questions without having to ask the question in highly public forums.

Enhance Education’s MyOpenCampus product tries to fill this requirement. It is an educational social network and content portal that provides content specifically for your degree, your discipline, your year. Basically it is a general educational social network, but it has groups for the specific classes your taking, information about your curriculum, notes, and other study material, and groups of your classmates for interaction. The difference between a general repository of such information from the internet and this repository is that this is found and uploaded by your teacher or fellow-students and validated by the teacher. This is further supported by question & answer forums and discussion forums.

All of this is delivered to the students via the e-pad, a 7-inch resistive touchscreen Android tablet, which is smaller than a book, is always on, is always connected to the internet, and is cheap. It’s portable, can be used for accessing all the data from MyOpenCampus, all the documents, the study material, audio/video lectures, and it can also be used as an entertainment device. It will cost about Rs. 6000, and the first batch will go to Amplify Mindware students in June 2011.

Binoy Samuel from Digital Spice:

Media companies, design companies, publishing companies, gaming companies are all moving to mobile platforms from their usual medium. This is a huge market opportunity.

He gave a few examples of apps that have come through this route. One of the interesting example was of a book called “Bio-replenishment” on Bone Health, which has lots of information about the health of your bones, and what causes problems, and how it effects you. The book was expensive, at $50, and still not compelling enough for readers. They converted it to an iPad app with a lot of 3-D animations to explain the issues, and that is a much better format for this material.

In this space, there are opportunities in healthcare, animation, wildlife, e-Publishing, e-Learning, and retail design.

Anthony Hsiao from Sapna Solutions:

On why becoming a mobile developer is cool:

  • Because it is new and exciting and unknown
  • Because it is a completely new way to try and benefit the bottom of the pyramid
  • Because you can develop things and immediately try them on yourself
  • Because you can use maths and science along with computer science when developing for mobiles (e.g. accelerometer, gps, etc.)
  • Because you want to build things for users. Real users. Non-techies. Kids. And cats.

Mobile development is fast, always moving, high pressure. It’s a lot of hard work. It is not for everyone. Choose wisely.

What will be big in mobile:

  • Money transfer
  • Location based services
  • Mobile search
  • Mobile browsing
  • Mobile health monitoring
  • Mobile payment
  • Near field communication services
  • Mobile advertising
  • Mobile instant messaging
  • Mobile music

Anuj Tandon from Rolocule Games:

Quote: “I was a techie first. Then Infosys made me a donkey. Then I quit to join Rolocule and became a techie again”

Mobile Gaming is a hot area.

In Asia, mobile gaming industry will grown at 73% CAGR.

The biggest entertainment launch this year was not a movie, it was a mobile game. Consumers are willing to pay for quality mobile games ($9.99 per game). There is already good M&A activity in amongst mobile games development companies since 3 years of the launch of the Apple AppStore. e.g. Ngmoco acquired by DeNA, Tapolous acquired by Disney. Freeverse acquired by NGmoco. VCs have already made investments of over $100 in iPhone gaming related companies.

India, gaming industry is worth $7.9B in 2009 and will grow to $32B by 2014. Globally, gaming industry will grow 18%, but in India it will grow 32%.

What to expect at GNUnify – Pune’s biggest open source conference – 11/12 Feb

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GNUnify is possibly India’s biggest open source conference and it is happening in Pune on 11th and 12th February. The schedule (day 1, and day 2) is up and there’s a lot of interesting stuff.

There are workshops, talks, labs, and a wikipedia track. Here are what we believe are the highlights:

  • Workshops: There’s one workshop on efficient numerical computing with Scilab, and another on data visualization with R. Data visualization, data analysis and in general number crunching will be one of the most important activities of all software development in the next 5 years, so this is something that people should take an interest in. For beginners, there’s a two-day workshop on building websites quickly with drupal. And the ‘Beginning with Python’ workshop is another one you should take an interest in because python is a great language to learn and use. (There are also workshops on firewalls, GCC, C+Linux, and LaTeX that you can check out.)

  • Talks: there’s a bunch of talks on security, so anybody interested in this area has a good choice. Understanding Firewalls. Linux Hardening. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing. For the systems hackers there’s embedded systems design and development, there’s virtual networks various linux utilities, and linux kernel debugging. There’s lots to choose from for people in the application layer too: harnessing the poewr of sms for your web portal, Android native development, data visualization. There are a bunch of talks on mediawiki (the software that runs wikipedia) and Mozilla. And a talk on Haskell – one of the most interesting programming languages that you could learn today.

And remember, many of these talks are not by local Pune people; a lot of the speakers are travelling from outside Pune, and in fact, from outside India for these talks. So, if you miss these talks, you will not get a chance to hear them again for a long time.

And even after that long laundry list of talks that I’ve mentioned, there are a whole lot of other talks, labs, and workshops that I’ve missed out. So take a look at the GNUnify website and register to attend.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

PHPCamp is back – Register to be a Speaker

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India’s largest unconference, PHPCamp is back. PHPCamp 2011 will be on Saturday, 5th March, 2011. The venue is not yet decided but the call for speakers is out.

If you’ve done any interesting work in PHP, this is your chance to show it off to 100s of PHP developers and students (actually the number has been known to even go up to 1000). If your company is doing cool PHP work, then the easiest way to attract star PHP developers is to give a talk at PHPCamp.

PHPCamp is a “barcamp” for PHP developers and enthusiasts. It is basically an unorganized conference where anybody can attend, it is free and open to all, and anybody can register to be a speaker.

For more information check out the PHPCamp FAQ

Rescheduled: POCC event “Termsheet Basics #2” moved to 12th Feb

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A few hours back we published information about the Pune Open Coffee Club event Termsheet Basics #2: Negotiating with Angel Investors which was supposed to be on 5th Feb. However, a few hours later comes news that this event has been rescheduled to Saturday 12th feb; the venue has shifted to Persistent. So the final details are: Date: Sat, 12th Feb, 4pm, Place = Bhageerath, Persistent Systems, SB Road, Time = 4pm-8pm).

Please check out the updated event.

CloudCamp Pune – Day long semi-unconference on Cloud Computing – 5th Feb

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Cloud camp is a day-long event happening in Pune this Saturday. It is a semi-barcamp, in the sense that there are three tracks: 1 track of invited/sponsored talks and/or panels moderated by pre-determined speakers, 1/2 a track of demos by the event sponsors, and 1/2 a track of barcamp style talks. The detailed schedule is given below.

Cloud camp will be held on Saturday, 5th February, 10am to 6pm, at “Bhageerath”, Persistent Systems, SB Road.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Detailed Schedule

  • 10:00 am Registration & Networking
  • 10:30 am Welcome, Intros, and Thanks
  • 11:00 am Lightning Talks (5 minutes each)
    • Persistent Systems
    • TrillionTech
    • Microsoft
    • Clogeny
    • NetMagic
    • Nasscom
  • 11:45 am Unpanel
  • 12:30 pm Begin Open Spaces (organize the sessions)
  • 12:45 pm Lunch
  • 2:00 pm Open Spaces – Round 1
    • Migrating Applications to the Cloud – Strategy and Best Practices
      Moderated by Shreekanth Joshi and Janikaram MSV
    • To Be Decided(TBD) by audience (Library)
    • Demo by Trillion Technologies (Cafeteria)
  • 3:00 pm Open Spaces- Round 2
    • Can Cloud Computing level the playing field in India
    • TBD by audience (Library)
    • Demo by Microsoft Windows Azure (Cafeteria)
  • 4:00 pm Open Spaces- Round 3
    • How are Entrepreneurs Leveraging Cloud Computing (Moderated by Shaloo Shalini)
    • TBD by audience (Library)
    • Demo by NetMagic (Cafeteria)
  • 5:00 pm Wrap-up Session
  • 5:30 pm End

Organizers:

  • Shreekanth Joshi, Persistent Systems
  • Larry Carvalho, RobustCloud

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Termsheet Basics #2: Negotiating with Angel Investors – POCC Event – 12th Feb

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Update: This event has been re-scheduled for 12th Feb. All other details remain the same

Santosh Dawara writes:

The Pune Open Coffee Club is hosting an informative session on “Term Sheet Basics II: Negotiating with Angel Investors”.

Date: 12th February, 2011, 4pm (Saturday)
Venue: Bhageerath, Persistent, SB Road.

Entrepreneurs who are preparing to raise money from Angels can benefit immensely from a direct one-on-one interaction with attending Angels and experienced Entrepreneurs. The session will cover basic concepts that are unique to Angel investing such as ‘Convertible Debt’, common concepts such as ‘Valuation’, what preparation can help you increase your effectiveness and what to expect when you begin negotiations with an Angel.

This should be an exciting session as Angel Investing has subtle nuances as compared to other forms of institutional finance.

As an entrepreneur – will you prefer an equity round or a convertible note round – which is preferred by whom and why? What does participating preferred mean, and how does the math work in an exit scenario? What kind of anti-dilution protections are there and what are the differences? Do VC’s prefer to offer exits to early Angel Investors?

These and many other questions are encountered by investors and entrepreneurs alike every day. The session will introduce these concepts and considerations in order for you.

Presented by dynamic speakers and active angel investors, with extensive experience in venture creation, this session is a must for those focused on building or investing in new ventures.

The high level agenda will be as follows:

  • 1600 to 1630 Introduction to attending Angels
  • 1630 to 1715 Walk-through an actual term sheet template or memorandum of understanding
  • 1715 to 1730 break for tea / coffee
  • 1730 to 1830 Discussion, QnA between attending entrepreneurs and angel investors
  • 1830 to 1930 Networking

Here are some of the high level topics we can cover:

  • equity types and convertible loans
  • how much should be raised
  • pre-money, post-money, price per share – valuation vs. other incentives, pre and post cap tables
  • liquidation preferences
  • anti dilution provisions
  • protective provisions
  • post funding board composition
  • setting up the option pool
  • some key tips to entrepreneurs and to investors (not necessarily the same tips!)
  • negotiation tips and a mock negotiation if time permits

Note: